How to Attract Wasps for Organic Pest Management

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You can learn how to attract wasps easily: solitary wasps, which are unlikely to sting, prefer to nest in closed-ended tunnels. You can drill partial holes in logs or bundle sections of bamboo or reeds to provide favorable habitat for these wasps.
You can learn how to attract wasps easily: solitary wasps, which are unlikely to sting, prefer to nest in closed-ended tunnels. You can drill partial holes in logs or bundle sections of bamboo or reeds to provide favorable habitat for these wasps.
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Learn how to eliminate pests while restoring biodiversity with The Xerces Society's guide to organic pest management,
Learn how to eliminate pests while restoring biodiversity with The Xerces Society's guide to organic pest management, "Farming with Native Beneficial Insects."

Using native beneficial insects for pest and weed control serves to reduce or eliminate the need for chemical pesticides while improving the biodiversity of your farm or garden. With the inspiration and instructions in Farming with Native Beneficial Insects (Storey Publishing, 2014) from the Xerces Society, you can learn to identify beneficial insects and implement a host of projects designed to improve habitat for them.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Farming with Native Beneficial Insects.

Considerations for Gardeners

Habitat features like beetle banks, brush piles, tunnel nests, and insect hotels can all be scaled down for use in garden settings. Recently cultivated garden beds offer little shelter for ground-dwelling beneficial arthropods taking cover from inhospitable weather, predators that would otherwise dwell under leaf litter and mulch, and those beneficial insects that live part of their life beneath the soil. To support these diverse beneficial insects, gardeners can plant small beetle banks between vegetable beds, or even “beetle bumps,” small mounds planted with perennial grasses, within vegetable plots.

There are other steps you can take to bolster natural pest control by ground-dwelling arthropods. Using leaf mulch or straw in garden beds can offer shelter to predators such as ground beetles, sheet-weaving spiders, and wolf spiders. Consider providing some nesting opportunities for the predatory wasps that hunt common garden pests such as tomato hornworms and armyworms. You can create small wooden nest blocks with only a few openings or make small stem bundles and hang them throughout your yard for predatory wasps. Consider leaving naturally occurring bare patches of ground for nonaggressive ground-nesting solitary wasps that also hunt garden pests. Finally, insect hotels, creative stacks made from myriad materials, can be ideal for gardeners who like to experiment but are pressed for space.

  • Published on Nov 21, 2014
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